Can Cellphones Bring Justice in Afghanistan?

Give the Taliban its due. They’re brutal — but they run a more efficient justice system than the government. Afghanistan researcher Antonio Giustozzi recently found that the insurgents run an entire “separate judiciary,” outpacing the corrupt Karzai administration at resolving Afghans’ legal disputes. But a group of American lawyers thinks it’s possible to roll back the Taliban’s legal advances — all from Afghan cell phones.

Those lawyers have launched something called the Internet Silk Road Initiative, an effort to use urban Afghans’ heavy cell phone usage to bolster the country’s shaky rule of law. The big idea: a conference call.

But if a bland virtual-office tool doesn’t sound like it can turn around a deteriorating war, consider that much of Afghanistan is beyond the reach of any court, whether due to incompetence, corruption or sheer remoteness. That’s a vacuum insurgents exploit. The lawyers behind the Silk Road project, known as the Internet Bar Organization, want to pair traditional structures for adjudicating disputes that Afghans consider legitimate and match them with formal legal institutions.

The effort is just taking shape and there are a lot of obstacles to it. But the basic idea is simple. “People would dial in their disputes, a jirga would gather, the disputes would be resolved,” Jeff Aresty, the Internet Bar Organization’s president, tells Danger Room at STAR-TIDES, a demonstration of next-gen tools for nation building and disaster recovery. His central question: “How can we add some justice structure to the communications that people are already using?”

Aresty calls the idea the M-Jirga, for Mobile Jirga. It’ll be composed of “informal” leaders — local or provincial bigwigs, for instance — linked on the calls to government agencies who’ll enforce the decisions. Aresty doesn’t have more than that yet, and he generally thinks westerners shouldn’t do more than build a tool responsive to Afghan needs. He’s working with Afghan lawyers and the Justice Ministry to design the project and gauge interest in it. He’s also talking with a partner organization, FrontlineSMS:Legal, to design an SMS program where Afghans could text their grievances to the M-Jirga down the road.

Afghan cellphone subscriptions are booming, with 12 million users in a country of 28 million who didn’t have any cellphones a decade ago. But coverage in the country is spotty and uneven, especially in the rural areas that also lack justice, and the Taliban can shut down cell towers with a few threats. Aresty concedes, “Certainly, you wouldn’t start [the project] in those areas.” He wants pilot programs in relatively safe cities with good cell coverage like Mazar-e-Sharif or Herat.

If it sounds premature, it is. Aresty and his team are still gathering data about the basic structures of “locally trusted” justice structures and how to loop them in with an often-distrusted government. That’s hardly the only problem. The Internet Silk Road Initiative doesn’t have much funding. Even if it finds donors, he acknowledges the Taliban’s success in running shadow courts: “You tend to go with the folks serving you instead of people you don’t know.”

Perhaps, but Giustozzi found that in Ghazni, the Taliban’s judges became “as corrupt as the state ones.” Maybe Afghans would opt for justice on their mobile plans.